Our Non-Fiction Novelists

by JACQUES BARZUN

I

THOUGH it is a harmless guessing game to scan a stranger’s bookshelves, it takes uncommon skill not to misconstrue the evidence. When new acquaintances practice their art upon me, they often say as they straighten out their spines, “ Apparently, you don’t like novels.” And my usual impulse is to say, “You’re right, I don’t" which is a true answer to their unspoken assumption that “novels” means current novels.

Yet the fact is that my books include a fair number of novels, and that I am almost always in the midst of rereading some one or other of them. Only, the author is likely to be dead; he may be Stendhal, Scott, Fielding, Balzac, Meredith, Peacock, Melville, Dickens, Henry James, Trollope, Zola, Fitzgerald, Gissing, Hardy, Samuel Butler, or James Joyce. Or he may be as good as dead so far as the established character of his performance is concerned: E. M. Forster, Dos Passos, Shaw, Sinclair Lewis, or John Cowper Powys. I also reread with pleasure a choice batch of detective stories, whose authors I shall not list, to avoid vendetta by mail. What is true, then, as well as “apparent” to the friendly prying of my guests, is that relatively few novels of the last two decades have stirred my imagination enough to make me want to keep them for a second look. What’s the matter with me—or with them?

The first half of the question, the reader can perhaps answer for himself when he has finished my answer to the second half. So far as I know, I am moved by no hidden or special view of what a novel should be. It is not a formal or intellectual standard that I impose. In fact, I am rather impatient of critics who define the novel in the abstract and test every work for its conformity with their definition. As for me, I love Gil Blas, which “has no form,” and The Longest Journey, which “does not keep to the point of view,” and The Woodlanders, where there are “too many coincidences,” and Notre Dame, where there is “not one real character.”

And if I ask myself what these and many other works of fiction that I enjoy have in common, I find the simple answer that they are fiction, that is, made up; and that reading each is invariably and strictly a novel experience — if not “news from nowhere,”it is at least news from somewhere else. Each book, in short, gives me the impression of being at once a world and not this world. Each is clearly a creation, though it is a creation that strikes us as natural enough to seem an equivalent of the creation we know, or think we know. For example, in reading Tolstoy’s account of the long-drawn-out agony of Prince Andrei, we feel “it must be so, though we have not experienced anything comparable. And since Tolstoy himself had not yet died when he wrote those wonderful chapters, he too must have said, “It must be so,” creating the experience out of mysterious intimations in his own soul.

Since these artistic means are different in every creator, it follows that their worlds seem different and that only the different ones are worth re-exploring. An analogy suggests itself with the many schools of painting in Western art. A Dutch haystack differs from an Impressionist haystack as much as either does from a haystack by Millet or by Constable. Yet “haystack” is what they all truly denote, however simply or strangely that common object is used in the made-up, two-dimensional world of color, line, and personality.

And just as the painting has to be arresting in some fashion, through richness or bareness or quiet or drama, so the novel has to entice first and then compel the voyage of discovery. The great question about any novel is whether the opening paragraph gives appetite or nausea. By first paragraph, I mean its real beginning, for some novels like The Scarlet Letter and Ivanhoe and even War and Peace—are preceded by a long and dreary gangplank, which on a first journey should be skipped over. Very soon after comes that unmistakable feeling of being embarked.

Some readers, I know, profess to “ like stories" and to “like people,” so that presumably for them any coherent tale has charms. They never ask themselves whether they want to hear about Bert and Angelina, what he said to her and what she said to him. Without flinching they can face that dreadful yanking backwards over forty years: “On the tenth of June, 1900, Maria fell off the kitchen chair and broke her leg. It was already hot in Mudville. . .”They are steeled against the chatty first person: “No one could have called me a precocious child. . .”

Well, temperaments vary and I am ready to admire these supermen who actually hanker after the mammoth tale, with three generations pickled and potted within its covers, or even bettor — from their point of view — the prose saga of which only the first volume, centered upon the invention of the cotton gin, has been finished after careful checking for historical accuracy.

But I believe that literary experiences vary even more than temperaments and that there is an inverse ratio between the enjoyment of new novels and the knowledge of earlier originals. For example, I turn to the book review section and read: “a wellrealized novel of small-town life in the last century . . . narrow, day to day existence . . . catastrophe growing out of flaws in their undeveloped personalities . . . fine atmosphere—the church, social life, furnishings. . . .” I do not know the writer, but it is a fair guess that I know the book. It was first written by Balzac a hundred years ago, and perhaps a dozen great Variations have been composed upon it since. There exists in consequence a repertoire, a “property room,” from which the careful modern writer can select pieces to put together in the likeness of a novel. The result may he deft; it may fill a want of a semi-educational sort; but it belongs under the head of inexpensive reproductions of the old masters, for it is neither the edible haystack nor a fresh vision of it.

Perhaps we come too late to expect any novel experiences from the novel. The genre may be exhausted, though it is always pointless to prophesy artistic negatives of this sort. The only thing to say is that for a good while now, the alert reader has only had his memories stirred by new novels, not his sense of life and of life’s endless translatability. Instead, looking back over a “new” work just read he could say: —

“Hardy country. A Jamesian young man, whose father is a Dickens character, steps out of a Galsworthy house just as a Jane Austen girl goes by. Thackeray suspicions art’ in order. All, the Meredith ahead! But no, the girl’s father is a Trollope clergyman. Early a widower, he brought up his baby Austen as a Charlotte Yonge lady . . . Flaubert! Flaubert!”

2

IT WAS in this lighthearted and, I hope, inoffensive, state of mind that I took the almost unanimous advice of well-wishers and read Mr. Isherwood’s Prater Violet. Though termed a novel on the jacket, it is in fact a short tale, told in the first person and in the author’s own name. This device, coupled with constant references to recent world events, should strongly reinforce the prime figment of fiction, the vivid feeling that it “really happened.” But as I read on, with more courage than encouragement, I found the pulse of interest beating lower and lower. It may be a merit in the narrator to make one feel as fatigued as himself, and as unwilling to go on with Prater Violet, the book, as Mr. Isherwood was to go on with Prater Violet, the movie. But this merit seems to me purchased at the expense of the naive man who inhabits every candid reader and who asks, “ Why go on?”

On the critical plane, what bothered me most, aside from the occasional banalities of the prose, was the lack of substance, and of comprehensiveness in dealing with the meager fare laid out. The movie studio was not the bedlam it was painted. The Austrian horrors and the weak-minded intellectuals’ response to them were not set off with discernible contours: it was a crucifixion in pastel. The character of Bergmann was meant to have size, even if grossness contributed to it ; and his varied impersonations were supposed to endow him with a three-dimensional likeness; but they were dull and out of drawing. The portrait was seemingly done in a state of self-disgust on the part of the writer. The little world he had chosen never got the push to start it rolling because he was too tired.

This is, of course, a mere metaphor of criticism; I am not imputing motives nor describing character, and possibly a great deal of energy went into this delineation of halfhearted lassitude. About the effect there can be no doubt: the writer tells us of his constant bewilderment, blushes, and — it is his own word, used in the widest meaning —impotence. One theme of the story is in fact the theme of creative energy, and at two points this power is discussed as connected with passion in the narrower sense. Bergmann’s admired inventiveness and strength of will go with a conscious claim upon the attentions— not necessarily physical —of women. At the end of the book, after Bergmann’s vindication as a movie director, the narrator returns to the theme, and confessing his own distrust of love, virtually explains his own failure.

To be sure, it may be a sign of character to fail in such an enterprise as making a silly Viennese movie, though one clear lesson in the story is that even potboilers take art and generalship to put through. But the more Mr. Isherwood chooses to paint himself as listless, uncreative, and yet not rebellious, the more he proves himself deficient in the zest that is needed to make a novel. A lack of love in the artist may argue a lack of lovable things in his chosen subject, but a lack of love plus a lack of hate, or derision, or contempt argues a lack of passion altogether, when passion is the only thing that makes the fiction world go round.

This characteristic modern manner has to do with the modern artistic situation of coming after so many models and masterpieces. The writer is afraid to push too hard, for fear that he may fall through the thin crust of his own perceptions and into the world already tagged “Balzac" or “Dostoevsky.”Every word runs the risk of being an allusion instead of a fiat. I noticed in passing that Mr. Isherwood. in localizing the motion picture company, had to liken the premises to “a lawyer’s office in a Dickens novel.” If God had used Adam’s rib in this fatally reminiscent way, life would be a great deal less exciting than it is.

No doubt many readers are flattered by seeing their choice literary background through these elegant transparencies called new novels, just as in modern music and modern painting the parody and pastiche styles find a ready following. But can any work sustain itself by making a specialty of tickling the palate, by subtlety, however artful? Brides head Revisited makes the attempt, yet leaves one reader, at least, fairly sure that subtlety is no virtue in art except in relation to other qualities. When you have put up a cathedral or laid out a symphony, the delicate tracery of detail is an added joy for creator and beholder alike. But a structure cannot be made of lace alone; and in the modern novel, the ingenuity and the love of “touches” applied to a weak or nonexistent core suggest decorated dry rot. If weakness itself is the theme, then let us have a monument of weakness.

One can understand why as long ago as 1914 James Joyce sought strength by turning his back on the production of well-done stories in the Impressionist manner; why D. H. Lawrence, after a “realistic study ” like Sons and Lovers, became weird and experimental; why Powys went in for passages of pure verbalism about vegetable life. Joyce, who was perhaps the greatest virtuoso, turned his knowledge to account by making parody and allusion serve a new form, in which the superposed layers of thought made a new world. That is what makes Ulysses and Finnegans Wake readable (because unreadable) and vivid worlds — because unlike the costume-and-prop imitations that you can find in Storybook Storehouse.

3

DICKENS,”I once read in a student notebook, “Dickens created no characters, only cockatoos.” This inspired misunderstanding of some lecturer’s commonplace brought me corroboration of another kind. We are on the wrong track if we think that what makes a story vivid is the lifelike representation of persons, and that after reading a novel we should be able to go out and as we say, meet the characters on the street. On what street are we likely to meet Hamlet, Don Quixote, or Huckleberry Finn? And why meet them if they do not bear those attractive names and show all that power of doing and talking to the point? Is the fact not rather that we use these names as loose synonyms for hasty moral judgments on quite ordinary people who have no character and certainly no completeness?

Our debates about “types" as opposed to individuals seem critically just as negligible, especially when we remember that we daily say of our friends.

— who are live and undoubted individuals, — “He’s a type.” The novel proceeds in fact on the assumption that we will recognize at a word enough ordinary things and traits so as to make us believe, by juxtaposition. in those unseen and forever unmet Pickwicks, Babbitts, or Karamazovs.

For the reality of a story does not depend on parts, whether persons or details, but on its spherical property, its being sizable, self-contained, and seamless. Characters may or may not inhabit it, and the characters. if any, need only find the air of that world breathable for themselves. Dickens’s people live in a Dickens world, James’s in a Jamesian. In Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame the fifteenth century lives through stones and proper names and functions of the social order; that is quite enough, and if the performing goat seems more interesting than the gypsy who owns it, even that fact is in keeping with the lively anonymity that rules church and state and the Court of Beggars.

What then defines a world for fictional purposes? I suggest that it is an Idea, taking this word in the original sense of an image in the head. The novel may or may not contain ideas in the usual sense of notions, opinions. It makes no difference, for a successful novel can carry in its orbit any amount and many kinds of matter. We cheerfully stand Balzac’s dissertations, Tolstoy’s lectures on history, and Dos Passos’s newspaper clippings. Indeed, they are wonderful ballast, and the motley effect of pudding stone only enhances the sensation that we are in a whirling globe, with a momentous admixture of irrelevance. In feebler work, the same cargo will be intolerable and probably destroy the illusion which it could help to create.

In short, the containing Idea is all-important, even though it is impossible to say ahead of time what it should be. Call if an infallible sense of physical limils, or of texture and internal coherence — you do not get closer to the secret; you only point to where it lies within the successful embodiments. Perhaps my earlier phrase, “it must be so,” sufficiently suggests that instinct which the novelist must possess, not in the abstract, but in relation to several million concrete things and several thousand interchangeable words.

This incarnation of the secret is the reason why, on a small scale, the Sherlock Holmes stories still have vitalily half a century after their modest first appearance. It is not because of Holmes himself, who is demonstrably no character, not even to his author. Conan Doyle contradicts himself again and again about Holmes’s “characteristics” and is generally as careless of detail, diction, and probability as anyone who ever held a pen. But the outer limits of the Baker Street world are defined with a sure touch, and in spite of lapses there rings throughout the action the unmistakable voice of the creator, the mother-mind which knows what is going on without having been told, and certainly without having hineinstudiert itself into the situation.

4

A NEARER illustration of my general thesis can be seen in the run of Boston novels. Their appeal to public and novelist alike is by no means entirely as vehicles for amusing satire. It is also, and I think mainly, as a ready-made world, which the readers find truly novel and which the writers need not carve out from the cosmos unaided. The contours were fixed for them historically by Boston’s own cultural consciousness. Henry James was the first to see the possibilities of this separate universe before it had quite separated, and like many a pioneer he appears to come last, with a reprinting, just this year, of The Bostonians— first issued in 1886.

In our day, the Boston series by other hands comprises John Marquand’s several variations on his initial George Apley; Mr. DeVoto’s earlier We Accept with Pleasure; Boston Adventure by Jean Stafford, and The Whole Heart by Helen Howe, whose satirical monologues on Boston manners antedate all of these. In We Happy Few, her second novel now off the press, Miss Howe returns to the locale, but with additions and modifications which command our interest.

Leaving aside her notable advance in technique and her unquestioned powers of informed derision, Miss Howe’s new book strikes me as fulfilling twice over the requirement that a novel should be a world in itself. Her first world is the workaday historical one of a university in wartime. Happily, in spite of the name Harvard, which recurs through her pages, the novel is not a “study” or a “cockatoo” of a particular place; We Happy Few is not a second Harvard Report in dialogue? It is a group portrait against a factual background. As she says in a note on the flyleaf, “The spectator who hopes to find the proscenium arch in the shape of a keyhole will be disappointed.” And the Boston side of the Cambridge story, with its national and international complications, is similarly disengaged from literalness. The author has kept in view, perhaps unconsciously, all that we have latterly soaked up about Beacon Hill and Its Ways, and she is not repeating a formula

under changed names.

Even so, we might feel that hers must be the farewell bit of Bostoniana for some time to come, if she had not, with considerable boldness, taken for her second province a hitherto neglected world of opinions and superimposed it upon the geographical one. Her spiritual microcosm could be called, in Lionel Trilling’s phrase, “the liberal imagination,” and her physical carriers for it are the Natwick family She has created Natwickery, as notable a creation as Podsnappery and perhaps more elusive. For hitherto— say in Huxley or in Forster—the workings of the liberal mind have been shown fragmentardy, in individuals, and in episodes incidental to a larger story. Even in James’s Bostonians an earlier embodiment of the same idea (Miss Birdseye) remains secondary. Helen Howe’s originality consists in having shown the inner coherence of a thousand petty actions with what we usually think of as a philosophy of life.

For this purpose a family was indispensable, though the difficulty was magnified by that choice. This can be shown by comparing the Natwicks with the Quaker group that Dreiser has “studied” — and failed to represent—in his posthumous novel The Bulwark. Everything in Dreiser is contrived and reported; whereas everything in We Happy Few is witnessed, by both author and reader. The central figure in the Natwick family, who is also the heroine of the novel, Dorothea, moves at last in a labyrinth of several intersecting schemes of life, and the skill with which the writer has kept the woman whole and Natwickish while the lines of force pulled asunder, or converged with crushing effect, argues the possession of that instinct which says, “It must be so.”

I do not myself wish to crush We Happy Few under the burden of an excessive duty, the duty of giving a new impulse to a genre that has fallen into the repetitiousness of old age. Miss Howe uses traditional means and these remind us of the more massive achievements from which they derive. But unlike others, her work recognizes what — to vary my image — I might call the anthropological duty of the novel as originally conceived. Every great example of the form has drawn its verisimilitude from the passion to show how a culture, a class, a state of mind, a moral law, would look if we had divine omniscience. The novel has been addressed to an ever widening democratic public which, being untaught and heterogeneous, could take little for granted. From the beginning, the novel has had an educational function; it has been an encyclopedia of fact and feeling, which may be why it has now reached superannuation. We are all “educated,” or at least we resist any further learning, which comes to the same thing.

Our “new” novels are therefore feeble apings of the old pedagogic gestures. We feel the writer’s cramp, as in Mr. Isherwood, or his dutiful performance of a drill, as in the usual lending-library “success.” Hence the unexpected pleasure of finding in Miss Howe’s second novel, despite the familiarity of the design, the fair resolution of the problem set, done with zest and more than a touch of passion. There is hope, too, in the fact that this is only her second book. Balzac wrote ten before finding himself, and you never can tell. lightning may strike Helen Howe’s pen before her next attempt, and fuse together the elements of a new fictional world; so that friends who bend over bookshelves and see what fills the blank space after Joyce will say, “Of course!”